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Dear clients & friends,
October 1st marked not only the beginning of Q4 of what feels like the most world-changing year, but also Jams' 3rd birthday!
I wanted to take a few minutes to share some cool stuff we've been up to during the last months, and a few key lessons from the past 3 years.
We started the year strongly focused on Bubble, but eventually started thinking more and more about traditional code and engineering for obvious reasons.
Bubble used to be a huge advantage when AI wasn't around, or even when it wasn't as reliable as it is today.
Since June, we officially stopped building new products from scratch using Bubble. Every new project that comes to Jams is built fully on custom code.
Because of this, we're now using a very interesting hybrid workflow.
Some projects are fully code-based while other projects are based on Bubble, and for the latter we're building a lot of custom plugins that are code-based and allow us to expand Bubble's capabilities.
Interestingly, Bubble released a pretty good MCP a few weeks ago, enabling us to finally leverage AI within Bubble projects.
We're clearly transitioning into custom code based web and mobile apps, using tools like Railway, Vercel, Supabase and Expo, and frameworks like Next.js and React Native on PostgreSQL.
But we also understand how important our deep expertise in Bubble currently is for businesses that still rely on the tool. For many of them, Bubble simply makes sense.
We'll continue to get the most out of Bubble and help existing Bubble apps be more scalable, while we build new products from scratch using open source libraries and modern software stacks, and we figure out the best way to migrate existing Bubble apps to code when it's necessary.
A few weeks ago we relaunched our website
We're very happy with some of the experiences we've built from scratch, like xVesta or The Fold. More projects are coming soon.
Diving deep into where we want to go next, we realized how challenging building AI first products is. We take building AI for granted because the only real consumer product we're all using is ChatGPT, so we assume that GPT is the definitive consumer way to integrate AI within our lives.
But embedding AI into existing workflows is where things get messy. Especially for an existing business operation.
Opening up GPT and looking up stats on an industry has nothing to do with being a multi-property portfolio manager and taking care of your tenants through an AI assistant (like we're doing on the xVesta app, mentioned above).
We're obsessed with crafting incredible user experiences. It's where we come from and how all this started in the first place.
So we're taking on the challenge. We're focusing our next years as a business to partner up with bold and ambitious founders and help them figure out how to design and build the most incredible user experiences in the age of AI. Products people actually want to open and use for real.
For products with existing traffic and real usage, we'll do our best to help drive more conversions, retention and revenue.
To start slowly achieving this, we've been building an AI brain around our product playbook. Monitoring existing user behavior and detecting product improvements on auto-pilot at scale is now more possible than ever, so we'd better "agentify" our way of working to be able to do this for all our clients while making sure we keep adding business value.
We're close to launching this brain across all our projects internally. Once we're done, we'll work on the client-facing side of the AI brain.
I've been thinking about the main takeaways and lessons learned from the last 3 years. I have one particular thought I'd like to share and it's about team culture.
One thing we had to go through at Jams was AI adoption and making sure all of us buy into the idea of riding the wave and just adapt to the changing times.
Without wanting to scare anybody, I kept insisting on the idea of either catching the one-time train or just missing it forever.
The team got it. But it took a fair amount of pushing and reminders.
As a team leader, I needed to keep insisting on the most important things to work on, non stop, week by week.
Sometimes I even have to remind myself that I need to stay on top of this and just keep repeating the same stuff over and over again for everyone to hear, myself included.
Our mission. Our values. AI adoption.
This got me thinking: how can I apply the same work culture with clients?
I can definitely see the difference between two types of projects and client relationships:
Project A) We're constantly pushing everyone within the project to follow a roadmap, stick to a schedule and keep the standards high.
Project B) We're going day to day, on-demand, and just reacting to whatever comes up.
Don't get me wrong. Some businesses do need the latter. But I learned the hard way that even those businesses can do way better if they run like Project A.
Personally, I also really appreciate when clients get to push us to do our best work. And they definitely appreciate when we push back while staying on top of things.
In the end, a better team overall drives a better product, and hopefully a better business.
Let's push each other to keep growing together and building better products.
Thank you for your continued trust and looking forward to what's next.
Best,
Juan